Cloud computing continues to grow as a preferred platform for information technology (IT) solutions. In particular, cloud computing allows enterprises to leverage shared resources in a pay “as you go” model, thus providing flexibility to adjust resources to meet the needs of a particular enterprise.
In a given cloud platform, end-users can access or alter (i.e., provision) available resources such as memory, servers, applications, etc., via an interface provided by a cloud provider or vendor. Cloud platform resources are typically requested with either a Service Management (SM) platform or a Cloud Orchestrator. The Service Management platform provides an end-user interface that essentially sits on top of a Cloud Orchestrator in a one-to-one fashion to handle service requests using industry standard service management protocols. An SM platform ensures compliance with ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library; www.itil.org) standards and is responsible, e.g., for managing service flows, managing user identities, managing change requests, providing task identification, managing group assignments, providing evidence for compliance & audit and forwarding the service request to a Cloud Orchestrator in order to provision the required resources. In the current state of the art, SM platform capabilities generally differ from product to product and vendor to vendor.
The Cloud Orchestrator contains self service catalogs and application program interfaces (APIs) for provisioning resources available in the cloud environment. The Cloud Orchestrator can receive and process provisioning requests directly from an end-user or from the Service Management platform if configured properly. Cloud Orchestrators are however focused mostly around self service catalogs operated directly by the end user. Only minimal service management functionalities are built into Cloud Orchestrators.
One of the challenges with implementing an SM based infrastructure is that many enterprises are trending toward multi-vendor disparate cloud systems (i.e., hybrid cloud environment) in which each vendor has their own Service Management platform and Cloud Orchestrator, each having different business logic and technical viability. Unfortunately, independently managing such an array of processes is tremendously complex when hybrid environment is desired. Current approaches to provide a hybrid cloud environment require manual, labor-intensive methods by enterprises seeking such approaches.